Welcome to Inkscape!

GSoC is a program where Google funds the development of specific features in open source software by university students. You don't need to be a Computer Science student to apply. Features to be developed are picked by Inkscape administrators from the pool of proposals submitted by students.

We've mentored about half a dozen students a year since GSoC started. Many students enjoyed their work and continue to be involved; perhaps your mentor will be a past GSoC student! We have a high rate of acceptance of student code into the core codebase. Indeed, GSoC projects have been a key source of some of Inkscape's best features in the past several releases.

The Inkscape team plans to focus this summer on codebase cleanup and refactoring. This will affect the type of projects we can accept this year; we're looking for ones that either won't affect core code too significantly (such as Extension scripts, or File Input/Output formats) or that would actually result in improving the state of the codebase (adding tests, modularization, etc.). Students who have already been active developers in Inkscape previously will be allowed more latitude to work on core code (particularly if it will result in cleanup/refactoring of their past work).

The "two patches" rule

We require two patches from each potential GSoC student, before accepting the student for GSoC participation (it is the same requirement as for obtaining rights to commit changes to the Bazaar code repository).
The reason for this requirement is that you can show us that you have succeeded in building Inkscape on your PC, and that you have understood a little piece of Inkscape's code and are able to improve it.
Inkscape is a large project, and you really should not try to understand all the code. Many (all?) developers know only parts of the program code!
You can join our jabber/IRC channel and ask developers for help.
To get you started on Inkscape development, here is a list of (probably) easy-to-fix bugs or small improvements that require very little knowledge of the whole program.

Add Mesh gradients in Inkscape name space with appropriate editing interface. (Note that Cairo now supports meshes and here is a WORK IN PROGRESS of a proposed mesh syntax for svg.) It would be advised to base work on the existing cairo rendering branch for Inkscape.

Please do not feel limited to the above ideas - some of our best contributions have been unique ideas that students had in mind from other sources!